Media Honesty

            As a country we are struggling with polarization.  Part of that has to do with what media we listen to, what media we believe to be telling us the truth.  And while I definitely have strong opinions about what media I believe is the most accurate and honest, I'm coming to feel that even the sources I believe to be reliable are questionable.  

          For example, I shared in another blog about what had happened at my youngest daughter's high school.  30 kids on the night of their graduation went to the campus and vandalized it with hate speech graffiti as well as damage to buildings using things like firecrackers.  I understand they have been arrested and are waiting sentencing.  I learned about this through letters from the school informing all parents of the class of 2023 that the entire class is now banned from the campus permanently.  They informed us immediately after the event that the senior trip was canceled, though later, when the 30 kids were caught, those who were "cleared" of culpability were still allowed to go on their trip.  In the span of 24 hours we received half a dozen emails letting us know what had happened and what the consequences were going to be.  

        But despite the large amount of vandalism and damage, there was not one word of this event in the local media.  Not one word.  Why?  Well, apparently the charter school they attend is afraid of losing their credentialing so they were able to keep the information out of the media in an effort to preserve good public opinion of the campus.  At another local school another hate crime incident received a great deal of coverage about what had happened on their campus.  But my daughter's school, which tends to be slightly more affluent, and to have many prominent and wealthy members of the community as parents, was able to put the lid on information going out to the larger community.  

      This event alone causes me to question what we hear in the news.  When the affluent and powerful voices are the ones who determine what makes it into the news and what does not, then everything we hear is skewed towards the rich and powerful.  Where are the voices of those who were hurt by the homophobic and racist slurs painted on the campus?  And more, what else are we failing to hear because it is about damage done to those we don't value as much, don't see as often, don't care about as deeply?  

       I know there is still valuable information in the news stories that are out.  But I will tell you honestly that I canceled my news subscriptions after this last event of media suppression.  As a person of faith, I am called to hear the voices that are being silenced, to uplift the oppressed, to focus my care on the "least of these" who are being harmed, ignored, and made invisible through our cultural practices.  If my local media does not lift up those voices as a priority, then I am not interested in supporting what they share.  It breaks my heart because I always thought media was supposed to be about exactly this: giving voice to those things we would not otherwise hear.  Instead it appears to be another cog in the wheel of a society that bows down before wealth and fame while ignoring the cries of the poor.  I do not choose to be part of that.  

Fear and Trust

Haggai 1:15b-2:9

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

               All of today’s lectionary passages speak to us about fear, and remind us that God is a God of life who tells us “be not afraid”. 

In the first passage, Haggai is speaking to the Israelites at a time following their return to Jerusalem after their exile.  The returning Israelites believed their well-being was intimately connected with the well-being of the temple, which their tradition told them was literally the house of God.  During the time of the exile, the temple had been destroyed, but now the Israelites have returned to Jerusalem, and the temple has been rebuilt.   For outsiders this would appear to be a time of great celebration and renewal.  But for the Israelites who knew the original temple, who remembered its former glory and believed that it and it alone was worthy of housing their God, this new temple in no way matched up with their images of what was due, it in no way matched up with the old temple.  For them, what should be a time of great joy and new beginnings had instead become a time of despair, and more, of fear of what this portended for their future.  What does it mean that the temple, the house of God is not what it should be?  Will God be angry?  Will their future be half what their past was, as the temple is half what the old one was?  It is within this context that Haggai is speaking to the Israelites and reminding them that they do not need to live in this new existence with this new temple in a state of anxiety.  He tells them that poor beginnings do not mean poor endings if you go forward holding onto and trusting in God.  God is a God of life.  God is all about bringing new life out of any death.  They can, therefore, go forward without fear because God is with them still.

               The passage from 2 Thessalonians gives a similar message.  The people in Thessalonica are also living in fear and anxiety about their future.  They are afraid that the day of the Lord has already come and that they have missed the boat, they have missed the second coming, they have missed out on ultimate life.  Paul, too, is telling them to not be anxious about what is to come, that God is the God of life and that their faith will keep them tightly in the loving arms of God.

               And finally the third passage from the book of Luke also shows a group of people in the midst of fear.  In this passage it is the Sadducees who are afraid.  They are afraid of Jesus, fearing the influence he is having on the people, fearing how Jesus’ radical messages of love might influence the people, their faith, and as a result, their actions.  Jesus is in no way a legalist.  And the Sadducees (and Pharisees) retain control of their world through the Jewish laws.  With Jesus teaching something broader but less containable, less structured, the Sadducees are terrified.  Their reaction is to try to trick Jesus, to trip him up, to catch him in an unacceptable position that will discredit and harm him  by asking him questions that it appears he cannot answer without alienating part of the crowd, part of his following.  Among and within the Jewish people were different groups with different beliefs about the resurrection, among other things.  If Jesus agreed with the Sadducees and said there is no resurrection, he would have alienated those Jews who did believe in the resurrection and visa versa.  So they confront him with a question designed to destroy the unity and size of Jesus’ following that they fear.  This question they pose to him is the third in a set of questions intended to trick Jesus, intended to get him into trouble either with the law or with his followers so that Jesus will be discredited, rejected, or worse, brought to trial.  All of their questions have been motivated by fear, and all three are intended to help them regain their power and control.

               To Jesus’ credit, and what gives us huge insight, once again, into the nature of God, is that Jesus  did not flee from or avoid any of these questions.  He also didn’t seek revenge or retribution.  Instead, Jesus chose to respond to these fearful people.  He engaged even those who were attacking him with their fear and trickery.  In answer to the trickery that we read about today, he basically stated that those who asked the questions didn’t understand what they are asking.  He backed this up by stating that they needed to look at their own scriptures to see where they were wrong in their own beliefs.  And while his answers, his lack of “falling into the trap” may have inspired even more fear in those who tried to trick him, still Jesus’ message, too, was one of letting go of fear, of trusting in God, of seeing that God is “the God of the living”, the “God of life” and not a God of death and destruction.

               We live in a fear based society, and I believe this is becoming more and more true.  We see this in every aspect of our lives.  The news is not just telling us bad things, but filling us with fear about what is to come.  They know that fear sells and they capitalize on that.  No matter what side of any issue you are on  you are told to be afraid, very afraid.  Each side fears different things, but still we are each told to vote out of our fear, rather than out of our hope.  Our fear culture includes more than this, though.  People are afraid to trust each other so we set up fences, walls, security cameras, alarm systems.  We have background checks for everything and we put into place outrageous airport security checks.  We surround ourselves with police and emergency call systems and the many, many other “things” and systems in our lives that are supposed to protect us and keep us safe.  Our business choices, who we give to, IF we give at all, how much we feel we can spare to share and care for the world – these too are usually reactive and fear-based responses.  We know the result of acting out this fear.  We no longer have any privacy in this country, for one thing.  We alienate and separate ourselves out from our brothers and sisters who are at all different from ourselves because we are afraid of them, afraid “they” will take what is “ours”.  In the extremes, we have all heard of people who won’t even leave their homes out of fear, or who are so germ-aphobic that they can’t engage life normally.  But even for those of us without that kind of extreme fear, we are governed in so many ways by our fears.

At some point we have to decide if we are going to live in the world or live of the world.  If we choose the values of this world, if we choose to trust our methods of security and if we choose to trust those things that we set up to protect ourselves in a scary world, we are not trusting God.  And what’s more, we are not really living.

How many of you have seen the movie “French Kiss?”  The movie begins with Meg Ryan’s character, Kate, acting as a typical middle class person, saving money, planning for the future, working hard to make the dreams of many a typical middle class person come true.  She is engaged to a Doctor, and living in a home away from home, which for her is Canada, hoping to become a Canadian citizen.  She has saved enough money to buy a wonderful house and she is dreaming and planning for the family and kids she hopes to have.  She seems happy and excited about her life and the only clue we are given that things are not all that they seem is that she is terrified of flying.  So when her fiancé invites her to go with him to France, she declines, despite all his urgings.  The crisis in the movie comes just a few minutes later when her fiancé calls from France to tell her that he has met another woman in France and that he will not be returning to her.  She feels the secure walls of her life begin to crumble and she pushes herself to fly to France, despite her terror, in a desperate attempt to “get him back!”   When she arrives in France, it seems she is met by a number of people who block her attempts to connect with her fiancé and finally, everything she has with her in France is stolen from her.  So now she is across the world from her home, without fiancé, without possessions, without security, without her passport or any other form of id, and on top of that because she left Canada to fly to France before her resident visa to live in Canada was approved, neither Canada nor the United States will give her a new visa.  She has, in the span of a day, gone from being a complete “has” to being a total “has not.” 

At first, she is devastated.  But as she later explains, “I thought, there is no way that everything I was building for could be destroyed (by some stranger... and so I bought a plane ticket, got on the plane, somehow made it over the big blue ocean,... and then the most extraordinary thing happened.  Everything went wrong.  I was wandering the streets of Paris, penniless, without a hope in the world.  And let me tell you, you can do a lot of soul searching in a time like that and I realized that I spent most of my adult life trying to protect myself from exactly this situation.  And you can’t do it.  There is no home safe enough, there is no country nice enough, there’s no relationship secure enough.  You’re just setting yourself up for an even bigger fall and having an incredibly boring time in the process.”

While it makes sense to be cautious and to not be stupid or fail to do what needs to be done in this life to take care of things, the reality is that choosing to live in fear prevents us from living at all.  God’s message again and again is “be not afraid for I am with you.”   Another consistent message is that we are freed by our faith in Christ.  And yet when we continue to live in fear, and when we continue to live in slavery to our fear of losing all the things we have, when we spend all our time working for things that will “protect” us from whatever it is that we fear so much, we fail to really live.  The very things that we set up to protect ourselves, keep us from living.  I think about this when I look at the way that we now protect our children.  I remember hearing one of our favorite comedians say that my generation was the last generation of children allowed to be children.  In my own childhood I wandered in the foothills of Mt. Diablo on my own.  At very young ages we were allowed to go out from homes to play with neighborhood children and we would be out and about most of the day before coming home.  We had play equipment at parks like those spinning merry-go-rounds and monkey bars.  This is no more.  All of this play equipment as been deemed “unsafe” but the reality is that most parks and cities are just now afraid of being sued.  We no longer let our children run around and explore and get scraped and banged up and hurt because we fear it.  But those bumps and scrapes and even breaks are what gave us the greatest lessons and frankly, the greatest experiences too.  More than that, they strengthened us for what life really is, the prepared us for adulthood in so many ways.  I am sad that my kids never got to try to build a fort out of wood they found laying around as I did, or face wildlife in the same way I did as a kid, running into huge spiders and even snakes on the hill and needing to make decisions about how to handle it.  Yes, our kids are protected.  But the result of this “protection” is that often when they are faced with the real problems of the world, they no longer know how to handle them, they no longer have the strength of having faced hardships as children to know how to handle hardships as young adults.

We can think of so many other examples of the damage that our fear has done in the world.  When we become afraid of our money being lost in the bank, a “run” on the bank is disastrous, as we know.  When we fail to take the risk of trusting in our relationships, our relationships can’t deepen.  When, out of fear, we set up protections against others, defining them as “enemies,” treating them as enemies, we make them into the very enemies we fear them to be.     

               The movie French Kiss ends when Meg Ryan’s character, Kate, learns to let go of her fear.  At the end she is still without country, she is still without her fiancé.  But even in this place, she makes the decision to help an outcast whom she has befriended.  She gives to a man who has also isolated himself from his family and friends, who has been acting out his own fear, who seems to be beyond hope and redemption – she makes the decision to give to him her “nest egg” of $45,000.  She does so in an anonymous way that he will never know she has given him this money, and she does it believing that she will never see him again.  She gives away all of her “security” and “protection”- out of love - just because. 

In freeing herself from her fear, Kate frees herself to really live.  And while at first there is some sorrow and grieving for her, in the end, letting go of her security and choosing to live in a sense of openness and trust allows her finally to really live the life she wants.

Fear leaves no room for anything else.  Like Truth.  Like Beauty.  Like Love.  It leaves no room for trying new things, making new friends, living with fullness.  It creates no space for seeing God or for hearing the words of the angels.  We have a choice to make.  Do we choose to live in fear?  Or do we instead trust in the God who loves us beyond anything, the God who came to be with us, who died because of us, who rose out of death into life: do we trust instead the God who says through the voices of the angels, “Do not be afraid.”

Loneliness

      I believe we are living in a culture that is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness.  I see it in the social media boom: people "talk" constantly through their tweets, Facebook and other social media as a way to try to connect to others.  People seem much more compelled to "speak" through these media sound bites than to actually spend time together.  Often, now, people become fixated on their social media even when they are with other people.  The other day I was having a very intense personal conversation with a friend who wouldn't put down his phone and was Face-booking and responding to emails even as he asked me personal questions.  I felt strange talking to a bowed head and the back of someone's phone.  It felt almost shaming to have a person ask me something very private while not making eye contact with me, but while, instead, typing away on his phone.  I felt invisible.  I clearly wasn't the priority in that moment.  But since he was asking me personal and deep questions, I also didn't know how to deal with the situation.  Looking back, I probably should have said, "I can wait until you are done" before continuing, but in the moment, that did not occur to me and I couldn't think how to be polite but also clear that I was not going to have that intimate conversation with the back of someone's phone.
      I found myself wondering why emails, Facebook and tweeting are so much more compelling than actually talking to the person in front of you.  Perhaps it's because it feels like we are talking to a whole bunch of friends at once.  We also don't have to worry about being interrupted.  We type what we want to say, taking the time we need to be specific and thoughtful about our words (or not), we don't always know who will respond or "listen" but we can expect that at least someone out there will.  Also, it is fast and we can disengage as quickly as we want.  We can, in a cyber way, connect with someone else for 30 seconds or for ten minutes without the pressure of an entire conversation, or with the awkwardness of beginnings and endings to one's time with someone else.  In our instant gratification society, that quick fix of a five minute interaction with a group of folk may feel very satisfying.  Some of us are more observers, others more sharers, but on social media we choose whether we just browse and read others' comments, respond to them, or start a line of conversation ourselves.  It seems perfect. It takes away the loneliness, gives us instant support when we need it, an instant entertainment otherwise.  It does not require much from us, we only engage it when we want to for the length of time that we choose.  We get to engage more than one person, usually, at a time, and we can talk about anything we choose, saying whatever we want in the time and space we want to say it.
      Sounds ideal, right?
      Except for the long list of downsides to this.  First, we are forgetting how to really talk to each other, how to truly build relationships, how to go "deep" with another person, something that takes time and intentionality.  We are physically isolated in our homes with only our electronics to keep us company.  We no longer touch and engage real people.  I ask you to consider, how many close friends do you have at whose homes you could just show up at any time?  Most of the real "talking" we do with close friends is still done through electronics, mostly done by text or by phone.  How often in a week do you get together with friends to just be together?  It's not like the way it used to be when people saw each other daily and met for coffee in each other's homes with regularity.  We live in our little boxes, rarely know our neighbors, those who actually live and breathe and work and eat near us.
      This also means that we tend to only be friends with people who have similar ideas and visions to ourselves.  We are friends with those with whom we work, perhaps, or those in the same fields.  We aren't pushed to know the next door neighbor who has radically different politics or a different faith from us.  We only connect with like-minded people, and we are the ones who lose out as a result.  Our ideas are not expanded, only supported by others who are similar to us.  Our vision and thoughts aren't pushed or challenged.
      Another obvious problem: people can become mean behind the anonymity of media.  It is easy to forget that the person you are talking to is a real, flesh and blood human being with feelings and thoughts and worries and histories and experiences which make them vulnerable, fragile, REAL.  We've all read about the damage done through cyber bullying, the teens at risk because of the cruel words spoken to them or the images sent to them that damage psyches and sometimes lead to suicides.  This happens to adults, too, in case you were wondering.  The habits of anonymous and cruel cyber bullying grow with the cyber bullies into adulthood and become a pattern of terrible meanness that injures far more people than we will probably ever know.
      All of this also leads to further emotional, psychological and even physical issues.  There is a wonderful video out about the causes of addition that suggests that a large part of our personal problems stem from social isolation, from loneliness, from a lack of support. While I don't agree that this is the only cause of these problems, I do think that we need to start looking at the social causes (and social solutions!) to these issues with much more seriousness.
      We know our politics are becoming much more polarized as we forget how to talk to each other, and more, how to listen to one another.
      What if, for one day a week, everyone were to put down their phones, computers and other electronic "friends" and actually go spend time with their real human friends, or, even more radically, with their neighbors?  How would our lives change?  How would things be different?  Might we start learning to talk and listen to each other again?  Might we begin to close some of the gaps in our thinking and understanding and visions for the world?  Might we learn and grow and deepen in new ways?  And, most of all, perhaps we would find we aren't so lonely anymore.  And that would not be a bad thing!